Two janitors, one mop, no brooms — and a different ending every night. Broom Play, a new physical tragicomedy written by and co-starring Matte Kranz, gets its world premiere in the third-floor loft at The Players Theatre from November 5.
XYZ Theatricals is producing the world premiere of Broom Play in the Steve & Marie Sgouros Theatre, the loft space on the third floor at The Players Theatre, 115 MacDougal Street. Performances begin on Thursday, November 5 and run through Sunday, November 29, with opening night on Saturday, November 7 at 7 p.m. Press performances are on November 5 and 6.
The setup is two men and a room that will not come clean. Kranz plays Jerryll and Mike Donovan plays Harr’, janitors who return day after day to the same building — no water, one mop and, despite the title, no brooms. One of them has stopped wanting anything and calls that peace. The other cannot let go of the idea that his life might still turn into something else. Egor Trukhin directs, and the piece works through clowning and corporeal mime rather than plot. It carries multiple endings and shifts form from performance to performance, so no two nights close the same way.
“We are living in a time when the funny and the frightening exist together in the mind of a human being,” Trukhin said. “The air we breathe today is the air of terrible daily losses. It is a time of crisis inside the human being, a time when tectonic plates are shifting. Very Shakespearean time.”
The director called the repetition at the center of the play a mechanism. “They do the same things again and again. And the more they repeat it, the more something accumulates inside them, almost like a nuclear explosion,” he said. “This play is the anticipation of that explosion.”
Kranz is a Polish American actor, playwright and filmmaker from the California Bay Area, now based in New York and studying for an MFA in acting at Columbia University. His screen credits include Artificial, The Gates and Meme Me, and he is trained in clown, stage combat and corporeal mime. Donovan’s credits include The Banana Children, All Hail Santa Claus and Miles Away. Trukhin trained at the Oleg Tabakov Moscow Theater School and then at GITIS, and his wordless tragicomedy Six Characters was presented at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in January. His Chekhov piece The Black Monk is booked into HERE Arts Center for January and February 2027. Hera Jung is the stage manager. XYZ Theatricals was founded by XiaoYan Zhu and Zihe Tian.
The regular schedule runs Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 7 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m. through November 29, and the running time is 90 minutes. General admission is $35 and student and senior tickets are $25. Premium seats are $45 with a signed playbill, $65 with a signed poster and $95 for the Support the Artist tier, which also comes with a signed poster. Tickets are on sale now through the production’s own site, broomplay.com, and its OvationTix page.
One practical note before you book: the Steve & Marie Sgouros Theatre is two flights of stairs up, and the building has no elevator.
